Rare, very rare, is that storyteller in Indian cinema who tells the story of you, me and them away from the margin, without his heart missing a beat and his head held high. Talent, and courage, vision and grammar, grandeur and gravity – Rituparno exemplified all this in two decades of working life. If this is amazing, one should remember that the filmmaker was also a successful editor of a popular film magazine (Anandalok), a chat show host (Ghosh & Company), and creator of a musical on the small screen (Gaaner Opare).

Born to a documentary filmmaker, Sunil Ghosh, and brother to art director Indranil, Rituparno in 1990s made Bengali cinema relevant nationally by moving away from both, the “cheap Bollywood (or Mollywood) knockoffs” and the “too-serious-to-be-taken-seriously” genres. Experimenting with styles, challenging established tomes, setting new standards, he reversed the trend and brought to Bengali cinema Aishwarya Rai, Ajay Devgun, Abhishek Bachchan, Soha Ali Khan, Preity Zinta, and of course Amitabh Bachchan. His master in celluloid art was clearly the towering Ray. “I’ve been a strong admirer of his works and in particular I’ve been influenced by the way he rises to the challenge of negotiating a group of characters. I learnt the art of scripting by repeatedly watching Kanchenjunga, Aranyer Din Ratri, Shakha Prosakha,” he said when he got a Lotus for scripting Dahan.

Rituparno could afford to be blase about National and international awards. The golden and silver Lotuses at his Indrani Park residence amazes by its diversity even more than its number: Best Film (Unishe April), Best Director (Utsab, Abahoman), Best Screenplay (Dahan), Best Bengali Film (Dahan, Asookh, Shubha Mahurat, Chokher Bali, Sab Charitra Kalpanik, Abahoman), Best Hindi Film (Raincoat), Best English Film (The Last Lear), Special Jury award (Chitrangada). Perhaps the only one he missed was as an actor, for his nuanced double role as a gay filmmaker who himself enacts the younger life of Jatra legend Chapal Bhaduri richly deserved accolades. But in all probability, they’ll keep coming in, for Rituparno had just completed shooting Satyanweshi while we waited to see his biopic on Tagore.

Rabindranath was close to Rituparno’s heart. A set of Rabindra Rachanabali was his wedding gift to actress Rituparna Sengupta. In fact he used Tagore’s focus on the deprived sexuality of widows, to craft a turn-around for Bengali mainstream cinema with Chokher Bali. “It’s time to re-read him,” he’d said as he launched on his version of Chitrangada, his last released film. It had large tracts of autobiographical elements “but it’s not about same-sex relationship,” he’d underscored. “When Tagore picked up the incident from Mahabharat, he changed the reproductive purpose of Arjun and Chitrangada’s alliance and turned it into a fight for identity. He had created an openly queer text,” after reading which Rituparno re-viewed even the man-to-man equation in Chokher Bali.

And woman-to-woman relationship? He was easily the one to make it relevant for present times. Women and their lives have inspired classics by Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, and certainly Satyajit Ray. Instinctively Rituparno not only focused on their woes, he created a mosaic with these characters who were seldom pitted against one another as much as against their innate weaknesses.

The human aspect of filmmaking fascinated Rituparno. Universally, the vulnerability of characters is raw material of drama, and “internationally women are more vulnerable than men. If a man is vulnerable, he has to be larger than life as in Shakespeare or the Greek dramas,” he’d said before crafting The Last Lear. But Rituparno was more taken up with lifelike charcaters. Maybe that’s why women, children, seniors, family as a whole dominated his scripts: Khela, Hirer Angti, Asukh, Utsab, Abahoman bear witness to this. He wouldn’t eulogise women or men for being what they are: human. That’s why Jhinuk, who protests the molestation of Romita in Dahan, refused to be felicitated – much like Rituparno who himself turned down countless felicitations.

Doubtless he deserved those, for his narratives on sexuality were a story in honesty to life. Unpretentious, gripping, entirely credible, they transcended the script and became a philosophy on the third sex’s struggle to find a just place in society. “Life as it is lived is full of adjustments and compromises. But there are times when the line between these get blurred…” Rituparno once said, and stepped into such a space as an actor in Arekti Premer Galpo/ Just another Love Story, because “few actors would believe in it or portray it with honesty and sincerity.”

An actor’s sexual orientation has little to do with a character he plays, but Rituparno challenged popular notions of masculinity with Sharbari Datta kurtas and long-flowing dupattas, his kajal and lip gloss, his walking the ramp at a fashion week in earstuds and necklaces. When he was spoofed, he shot back, “Why doesn’t anyone question a woman in jeans?” His declaration of androgyny did not stop at that – he reiterated through JALS and took it further through Chitrangada. In doing so, he became the change he wanted to see in a society that shuns discussions on sexual orientation.

“Celebrate uniqueness” can, then, be the epitaph on the gravestone that has come decades too soon.

[This euology by Ratnotttama Sengupta appeared in a Calcutta edition of the Times of India]